Jack Elam | Kansas City Confidential | Dir. Phil Karlson | 1952 | 99 mins

Kansas City Confidential is a bank heist film and of course it goes wrong. It begins with a bitter ex-cop, Mr. Big (Preston Foster), rounding up three hardened criminals, each with a reason for fleeing the US authorities and each compelled to take the $300,000 payday. The story is ‘confidential’ because the crime was masterminded by an ex-cop and for this reason it does not exist in police files. The opening is an incredibly taught piece of filmmaking, one of the best in noir, not least in its memorable introduction of the three criminal recruits, each of whom defines menace in their own particular way. The film commences with Mr. Big plotting the heist from an apartment across from the bank, patiently marking a worksheet with precise timings of comings and goings day-after-day. He’s done the research, now he needs a team. Reaching into his notebook, he draws a name from stolen police files: Pete Harris. Cut to a dishevelled hotel room and an extremely jittery Jack Elam (gun holster over shoulder) frantically raiding his cigarette butts for something to smoke before turning to throw dice. A more rapid establishment of a character’s essential wrongness would be hard to find. The phone clatters and Harris instinctively lunges for his gun. He refuses to acknowledge Mr. Big’s call at first but succumbs to the immediate re-call. In close-up, Elam’s narrow, bony, stubbled face and heavy-set eyebrows over a misaligned and blind left eye (improbably damaged by a pencil in a scout camp fight at the age of 12), in contrast to Mr. Big’s calm and authoritative presence, presents a picture of desperate connivance as he weighs up his straitened options. Take on the job with a stranger for a big pay-day or stay on the run and wait for the authorities to nail him on a murder charge? The choice is already made. 

When Harris gets to Mr. Big’s apartment, he again jumps for his gun after Rolfe enters in a blank-faced mask (uncannily resembling the one worn by the daughter in Georges Franju’s 1960 surrealist fantasy horror, Eyes Without a Face). Mr. Big says aloud what the audience is thinking: “No change, eh, Pete? Still jumpy”. “That was a sucker move burning down your [gambling] boss”, he continues, “You had him all wrong, he never crossed you, but you’re a guy who shoots first and thinks afterward”. Harris knows Mr. Big has him under the thumb and tries to jump him, but his anger rapidly turns to limp helplessness when Mr. Big retaliates, slapping him repeatedly from side to side like a wet rag. Thrust back in a chair, sweating, gasping, eyes engorged, Harris’s frantic scheming remains intact. The scene is portrayed with profound edginess by Elam, whose anxious body movements mirror the high-strung emotive registers in that face, “kind of dark and real weird eyes”, of a hundred low-life crooks. Slowly, he regains his composure, calculating his position anew, and Elam brings a more measured side to the character: a survivor of sorts in a world gone bad with only one, inevitably doomed, way out.

With Harris on board, the next ‘interviewees’ are Tony Romano (Lee van Cleef) and Boyd Kane (Neville Brand). Romano is played with cold charm by van Cleef, a ‘ladies man’ with arrogance etched all over his cruel handsome face.  Neville Brand as Boyd Kane is granite-faced unrepentant cop-killer menace. Mr. Big, with access to police files, has them at his mercy, as he does Harris, making for one of the great hoodlum ensembles in film noir. They pull off the caper with a duplicated florist truck. Everyone wears those blank-faced masks so no-one can identify them, even each other, then they split to foreign countries and wait for things to cool off before plans to reconvene and share out the loot. The rest is about Mr. Big containing the volatile beasts under his precarious command and, unexpectedly, the gang avoiding an enraged Joe Rolfe (John Payne), the everyman truck driver who was framed (and beaten by the cops) for the robbery and now must prove his innocence to clear his name.

Rolfe, who becomes the main protagonist in the film, gets a tip to follow the trail of dice and cigarette smoke in Tijuana if he wants to find Harris. He finds him. Elam’s performance here embodies Harris’s character: dripping with cynicism, mendacity and bullishness yet wilting and desperate under pressure; at times almost gleefully arrogant and mocking, at other times skulking, waiting to strike out or escape the clutches of the latest force come to restrain his restless criminality. Eyes contorted with anguished pleading and veering deliriously between self-pity and self-preservation with whatever escape plan he’s momentarily hatched, Elam expertly conveys the transparency between Harris’s interior cunning and his overwrought facial expressions. It’s a performance of great physicality that soon comes to a bad end, shot by the police while reaching for a gun he no longer has, and croaking out one final great line while spitting blood on his way to death: “This is a laugh. All that dough”.  

With such a memorable face, Elam acted in many great gangster films and Westerns, including an iconic turn in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), but his tough, stubbled visage also worked a treat for noir. In the early-50s, he considered getting his eye fixed, but Darryl Zanuck, then head of 20th Century Fox, convinced him against it. With his kind of looks, Elam would never be a leading man, but the ‘lazy eye’ became part of his mystique, a mark of distinction that helped sustain decades of work in Hollywood. A lazy eye, however, is not enough for a “veteran baddie” career like Elam’s, and his performance in Kansas City Confidential, easily matching if not superseding the lead actors he plays alongside, is just one example of his acting quality across a 40-year career of bit-part gems.  

Neil Gray.

View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/KansasCityConfidential720p   

Frances E. Williams | The Reckless Moment | Dir. Max Ophuls | 1949 | 82 mins

Max Ophuls, the celebrated European director of such opulent classics as Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and La Ronda (1955) is perhaps not the first name to come to mind when discussing film noir, for his extravagant set designs and melodramatic leanings sit in firm opposition to noir’s minimalist hard-boiled aesthetic. However, Ophuls, a German Jew exiled in Hollywood during World War 2, made two films at the end of his American tenure which have come to be considered noir classics. Caught (1949), provides a harsh critique of wealth and power in upper-class American society, then comes a subtle and damning portrait of the middle-class family in The Reckless Moment (1949). 

The latter film centres around Lucy Harper (Joan Bennett), a middle-class housewife whose life is thrown into darkness when her daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks) accidently kills her low-life boyfriend Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick) after he suggests extorting money from her mother. Enraged, Bea hits him during a tryst in the family boathouse. She runs off, but unbeknownst to her, Darby stumbles, falls into the river and drowns. Lucy finds the body in the morning and manages to dispose of it. The police begin an investigation when the body reappears but there is nothing to link the Harpers to the death, nothing that is until Martin Donelly (James Mason) appears in Lucy’s front room brandishing letters Bea had written to Darby, given to Donelly’s dangerous associate Nagel as collateral for a loan. Now Darby is dead the letters have worth as blackmail material, and Donelly is there to extort the sum of $5000 in return for them. At this moment, the film’s emphasis shifts from the fate of Lucy Harper onto Donelly, who, enamoured with Lucy’s strong spirit and dedication to her family, begins to fall in love with her. He tries to convince Nagel to leave her alone, which ultimately saves Lucy’s family but dooms himself. 

The arena of the middle-class suburban household is a downsize for Ophuls who was accustomed to staging his elaborate tracking shots within the palatial interiors of late 19th century Viennese society, but Ophuls skilfully uses the architectural constraint to ramp up the claustrophobia surrounding Lucy. She is frequently framed through the bars of banisters or interior widow frames, constantly caged in. Her husband is away on business and won’t be home for Christmas, and her son, father and daughter ensure she never has a moment to herself. As Donnelly puts it: ‘You’re quite a prisoner, aren’t you?’. Lucy dismisses the comment, but part of the film’s power is her growing realisation that she is trapped in the social-economic situation of a housewife with no money of her own to pay the blackmailers, while being beholden to an absent husband. Is he even on a business trip? Just why isn’t he home for Christmas? Donnelly’s moments of consideration towards Lucy point towards this elephant in the room without anything being directly stated, and the husband’s absence is one of the great unarticulated elements of the film. Unarticulated verbally that it. Ophuls’ great skill is to communicate the characters relationships visually through gestures, objects, composition and framing. And when one starts to look at the film in this light one character begins to emerge as central to the film’s dynamic: Sybil, the black maid. 

Sybil (Frances E. Williams) has minimal dialogue, but is a constant presence on screen, viewed through internal windows in the house, working in the next room, or silently casting glances at the family as they converse. When she does speak, she has none of the exaggerated mannerisms associated with black maid characters of the day, she’s dignified and intelligent, understanding Lucy’s situation more than anyone, including Lucy herself. Frances E. Williams was a highly respected activist and actor who had just become the first black woman to run for The California State Assembly, someone who, presumably, would not take the role of a domestic worker unless she saw something worthwhile in the part. 

Within the prevailing context of race relations, it’s perhaps hard to comprehend now just how radical a figure Sybil is for a film made in 1949, and how radical the relationship between Lucy and Sybil is. In one scene, Lucy and Sybil discuss family finances in a way that appears more like the discussion of husband and wife than employer and servant. This implied suggestion of equality between Sybil and Lucy becomes more evident during the ending, where Donelly kills Nagel and drives off with the body and letters in one last attempt to protect the family. Sybil and Lucy give chase, during which Sybil gets her only close-up in the film as she utters: “I liked Mr Donelly”. It’s a key moment, there is so much tied up in the statement. Donelly has risked everything for Lucy and her family, how does this sacrifice compare to anything else in Lucy’s life? Compared to a husband who can’t be home for Christmas, say? Only Sybil understands this, because, like Donelly, Sybil notices things, all her actions reveal someone who sees how much is put upon Lucy within the home. She can see that Lucy is in real trouble and she sees that Donelly is doing everything he can to help. Lucy finally breaks down, uncontrollably weeping over the dying Donelly’s crashed car. It’s left to Sybil to take control of the situation and drive them home. Donelly has given Lucy the letters and tells the police he killed Darby just before he dies. The film ends with Lucy, still in tears for Donelly, on the phone to her husband saying how much he is missed, framed by the banister bars.

Although Williams’s performance is understated and deceptively slight, she is Lucy Harper’s only confidant within the family, carrying much of Lucy’s emotional burden and supporting her at her lowest moments, yet she barely says a word, reflecting the reality of many domestic employees, especially those who are black. Symptomatically, Frances E. Williams acting efforts themselves went formally unacknowledged in The Reckless Moment, for her name appears nowhere on the credits. Why bother, the producers must have thought. She had only one or two lines. 

Sandy Milroy. 

Watch Movie at: https://archive.org/details/therecklessmoment1949 

Vince Barnett | The Killers | Dir. Robert Siodmark | 1946 | 103 mins

What’s not to like? Directed by Robert Siodmark, an accomplished noir director, adapted from an Ernest Hemingway short story, and starring Burt Lancaster (the Swede) and Ava Gardner (Kitty Collins). Include a score by the masterful Miklós Rózsa and stellar minor performances by Edmond O’Brien (Jim Riordan), Sam Levene (Lt. Sam Lubinsky), Jack Lambert (‘Dum-Dum’ Clarke) and Albert Dekker (‘Big Jim’ Colfax), and The Killers effortlessly hits noir greatness. Siodmark was expert at weaving multiple parts into a whole and the plot is formally complex yet satisfyingly coherent, including several extended flashbacks––one of which ingeniously conveys the central single-shot heist through the diegetic narration of a newspaper report. The celebrated opening sequence alone is worth the ticket, with two gnarly big-city contract killers rudely descending upon a small-town diner, upsetting everything the local population has ever known about common decency. They’ve come to find ‘the Swede’, in hiding after a duplicitous caper-gone-wrong six years previously. The torpedoes execute the Swede within the first 10 minutes, and the questions that drive the remaining narrative are: who and why? 

Reardon, a life-insurance investigator, digs deep and patiently, providing the audience with a calm, methodical point-of-identification from which to comprehend the 

narrative as it unfolds in a series of outstanding set-pieces. The Swede is a former boxer caught up with professional gangsters after his bust hand ruins his career. He meets and falls immediately and irrevocably for the devastating Kitty Collins, an archetypal femme fatale, and is soon serving three years for her stolen jewellery. When he gets out, the Swede is called to a meeting with ‘Big Jim’ Colfax and his gangster acquaintances, including the pitiless ‘Dum-Dum’ Clarke, played by Jack Lambert, a real specialist in stone-faced movie tough guys. Kitty Collins is there too. Then the robbery. Then what? The plot is all about connecting the Swede’s murder with these gradually disclosed narrative threads.   

A long movie by noir standards, the time is used expertly by Siodmark to develop the characters, major and minor, within a digressive, fractured narrative that goes well beyond standard plot exposition. Vince Barnett’s turn as ‘Charleston’ is a model of a minor character done well. Charleston is identified dismissively to Riordan as some ‘old-time hoodlum’ at the Swede’s funeral, and we soon find them in a snooker bar with Charleston, boasting he won’t talk while being plied with yet more booze. This initially cliched set-up promptly gives way to a more emotionally nuanced performance as Charleston describes his close relationship with the Swede and a seamless dissolve throws us from the snooker rooms to the prison room they shared. 

In the superbly blocked and edited jail scene, the Swede lies in bed anxiously rubbing a silk scarf given to him by Kitty while Charleston gently ruminates on the stars to allay sleepless nights. This passion, he recounts to the Swede, turned into melancholic study of astronomy in the prison library: “I don’t guess there’s a better place in the whole world for learning about stars…than stir”. Within just a few moments the ‘old drunk’, seemingly easily duped by booze, is transformed into a wise and imaginative soul dreamily reflecting on his own position in a much larger drama: “Jupiter is to the earth like a football is to a marble. That big. And on the other hand, Mars ain’t no bigger than a bee. That small”.  

While the gaze of the elder Charleston is external and calm, out towards the starry constellations, the younger Swede’s gaze is relentlessly internal and anxious, fixated on Kitty and her whereabouts. Charleston is getting out of prison earlier than the Swede and Barnett conveys a tremendous sense of compassion when his friend the Swede asks him to check up on Kitty. With the greatest care he tentatively recalls the times he “studied up on girls” when he wasn’t in prison, and carefully intimates that when a girl doesn’t write to a man in prison “that doesn’t mean she’s sick…not necessarily”. Barnett’s skill in imparting this potentially heart-breaking news to the Swede is a remarkable portrayal of empathy and tenderness, firmly establishing his role as a trusted confidant of the Swede. 

Back in the snooker hall, Riordan enquires when a particular incident happened to a by-now thoroughly pasted Charleston. His disarming fateful candour brings a wry smile to Riordan’s face and provides another great line: “Mister, when it comes to dates, 1492 is the only one I can remember, I can tell you what was the last time but not where or when or who was present”. Nevertheless, Charleston does recall the ‘what’ when he recounts the meeting that he and the Swede attended with the gangsters (and Kitty) before the payroll job. Barnett reveals another side of Charleston when he calmly and clearly gives his reasons for pulling out of the robbery, and we realise he’s a man of proven experience treated with great respect by his peers. On his way out, glancing over at Kitty, he quietly warns the Swede that he’s about to land himself in trouble, but he knows the Swede is doomed. Outside, he hangs around the door like an old beat dog waiting for a master––a master that will never come home again.  

The Killers is rightly famous for providing Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner with their first major roles on screen, with both fantastic, especially Gardner’s deliciously casual and calculating performance as a femme fatale par excellence. Yet Siodmark’s aptitude with minor actors is renowned and Vince Barnett’s turn as Charleston displays the immense skill he developed making limited screen-time work in hundreds of (often uncredited) bit-part performances as careworn ‘little-men’ (undertakers, janitors, prisoners, bartenders and drunks). Charleston reveals the most of all about the Swede’s ill-fated arc in The Killers and this is largely down to Barnett’s compassionate and complex portrayal of a nominally careworn ‘little-man’, too often delivered as an afterthought to the main action.

Neil Gray.

View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/thekillers1946usafeaturingburtlancasteravagardneredmondobrienfilmnoirfullmovie_202001 

Walter Baldwin | Cry of The City | 1948 | 95 mins

About a third of the way through Robert Siodmak’s Cry of The City, we find small-time thief Martin Rome (Richard Conte) stuck in a prison hospital awaiting the trial which will undoubtedly send him to the electric chair. He’s been badly wounded in a shoot-out that resulted in him killing a cop, which is why he’s going to fry. As if this wasn’t enough, he’s also increasingly worried for the safety of his sweetly innocent (and shockingly young) girlfriend Teena, who the police want to question in relation to another killing which Martin didn’t do. There is also the matter of a bent lawyer who believes Teena could be tortured into confessing this murder, thereby letting his guilty client off the hook. 

Martin desperately needs a way out of the prison hospital but for the time being he is stuck arguing about the cost of getting his bed sheets changed with a bullish guard called Ledbetter. As the two men squabble, a third man is seen mopping the floor between them. During the dispute the man flashes a signal to Martin to let him know he can get his sheets changed for a dollar less than Ledbetter is proposing. Martin haggles and gets the price down, but as Ledbetter leaves he walks into the floor-mopper’s bucket, leading the disgruntled guard to unleash a torrent of abuse at the poor guy. Once Leadbetter is out of earshot this put-upon character offloads his woes to Martin about Leadbetter constantly calling him names. Martin tells him not to worry, that Ledbetter is just a “big boob”, the old boy likes this and with a grin repeats the insult then waddles over to Martin and introduces himself proudly as Orvy (Walter Baldwin), a trustee of the prison. 

There is a great subtle physicality to Baldwin’s performance which gives it a realism so often missing from the ‘simple soul’ character that he is portraying, keeping the whole thing from slipping into parody. It’s already a memorable performance and he’s only been on screen a minute. But then comes the clincher! Orvy leans in, his demeanour suddenly changes, and a shrewd confidence takes over his face as he asks: “Wanna break out of here Marty?” It’s a great noir moment, as Orvy’s initial semi-comic relief character suddenly become another scheming noir hustler. He lays out his plan of how Rome can escape and how this will inevitably mean the sacking of Leadbetter. Orvy’s out for revenge and he's thought it all out. For a moment he’s suddenly the brains of the operation, seducing Rome into his scheme. It’s a fine bit of acting, the balancing act of the separate aspects of Orvy’s character is handled deftly, one constantly present in the other. 

The theme of duplicitous personality is constantly present throughout Cry of The City, from the sudden switch of Niles the lawyer from jokey charmer at the start of one scene to the leering deliverer of repugnant threats by the end of it; to Martin’s kid brother who is all wannabe street hoodlum until things come to a head and the real sweet sensitive kid we’ve suspected was there all along is revealed. The main emblem of this trait though is Martin who, by the end, is only vainly trying to fool himself that he could be the loving partner to his sweet innocent Teena. There are numerous great performances (with Berry Kroeger, who had one of the best sneers in noir, excelling as the vile Niles) but for all his brief time on screen it’s Baldwin and the character of Orvy that stands out. With the other characters you see it coming, the bent lawyer, the tough kid who ain’t so tough, and the crook who thinks he can change are all staple noir types, but to take a loveable child-like character who “writes like a three-year-old” and give him a cold streak of devious intelligence is not something you see too often. And Baldwin is pitch perfect.  

Baldwin had been a prolific small parts actor who, after some time in theatre, began a busy film career in his fifties, racking up near a hundred film parts in the 1940s alone. His roles were mostly amenable kindly grandpa types, often in romantic comedies and he was resoundingly not a noir regular, although he does turn up in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) as an uncharacteristically gruff garage owner. However, with the role of Orvy, Baldwin shows he was an actor capable of memorably nuanced and powerful performances, something it seems he was rarely given the opportunity to explore. There’s a moment just before Richard Conte’s character makes his bid to escape, where he grabs Orvy’s collar and asks him straight if he’s sure his plan will work. When Orvy replies, with sly malevolence, “sure, I’ve been working on it”, the blood runs cold and you wonder what Baldwin could have done with a really nasty role. 

Sandy Milroy.

View Movie here: https://archive.org/details/cry-of-the-city-1948_202008 

Richard Rust | Underworld U.S.A. | Dir. Sam Fuller | 1961 | 1h 39mins

The visceral tone of Underworld U.S.A. is established during the opening film titles, backed with a menacing score over static shots in a dilapidated back alley. The revenge plot incorporates an astute exposé of modern-day criminality, but the rudiments are basic. The young Tolly Devlin (David Kent) witnesses his father being beaten to death by four thugs in the same kind of alley that opened the film. Haunted by this memory and with orphanage and prison failing to sate his thirst for vengeance, he sets out as an adult on a relentless mission of retribution. In the meantime, the thugs who murdered his father have become leading figures in a powerful crime syndicate.  

Sam Fuller was great with minor characters. Beatrice Kay as ‘Sandy’ eloquently captures that resigned fatefulness so distinctive of working-class characters in noir, who just know that things will take a turn for the worse. Dolores Dorn lends real pathos to ‘Cuddles’, a flaky young woman whose drinking habit has led her into a deadly situation with the crime syndicate––a situation she comprehends with a sober clarity belying her lush persona. Robert Emhardt as ‘Earl Connors’, the crime syndicate boss, is smarmy cold-blooded malevolence personified. But Richard Rust as ‘Gus Cottahee’ is perhaps most emblematic of Fuller’s directorial intentions. Gus initially appears unlikely: beyond the sharp suit his boyish looks are more suggestive of a surf movie bit-player. Yet, his performance expertly embodies the seemingly smooth business front of the crime syndicate and the barbaric underside of organised gangsterism. 

Gus is first glimpsed when Tolly breaks into the crime syndicate premises and is disturbed by Gus and Cuddles entry. From Tolly’s hidden viewpoint we see Gus calling his boss, letting him know that Cuddles refused a drug pick-up. A hint of regret creases his face when he’s ordered to rub her out, but in a signature move, he dons his sunglasses––to the alarm of Cuddles––an action allowing him to inhabit a more ruthless character-mask. The wearing of the sunglasses “switches on the killer” explained Fuller. “Afterwards he takes them off and he’s a regular guy—good to his mother, pets his dog.” As Gus sets about beating Cuddles to death, we hear him mutter: “I’ll miss you”. But Tolly slips out of his hiding place, knocks Gus out and helps Cuddles escape. 

In a turn of events, Gus inveigles himself within the syndicate. Tolly is tasked with giving him a tour of National Projects, the apparently legitimate front of the syndicate. The tour is interrupted when Gus is called to undertake another order. For just a moment a grimace of anguish ruffles his implacable demeanour, mirroring his reaction when ordered to kill Cuddles. He resumes his tour, recalling his time acting as a lifeguard to the underprivileged kids whom the crime syndicate once invited to their rooftop swimming pool as part of their charity front. “I liked that”, he recalls ruefully. 

In the next scene Gus rolls up in his car and chats affably with Jenny, the daughter of Mencken, who betrayed the syndicate. Crouching down and using her first name as if he was an old friend of the family, a nice college boy chatting with a nice young girl, he asks for her father’s whereabouts while cajoling her with chewing gum. Jenny says he’s away and cycles off contentedly with her gum. Gus slips into a grocery store to let his boss know that Mencken can’t be found. He is ordered to kill Jenny instead. Gus turns to stone. Accompanied by a grim drum roll on the soundtrack, he exits the store, pausing briefly to don his murderous sunglasses. He enters his car and Fuller ratchets up the tension with a masterpiece of intercutting between the girl on her bike, increasingly petrified, Gus remorselessly chasing her down in the steadily accelerating car, and Jenny’s mother screaming with horror from the window of her house. The sequence ends with an elliptical shot worthy of Fritz Lang: the bicycle mangled and the girl sprawled out on the road dead. 

Tolly later deceives Connors with the help of the police (Tolly is smarter and more motivated than both the syndicate and the police), falsifying police reports to suggest the syndicate thugs who killed his father are police informers. Connors takes the bait and calls Gus to take care of business. Gus knocks out Gunter, one of the thugs, at Connors’ office. Cut to a close up of Gunter trapped in an overturned car at night, streaming with sweat, desperate and utterly terrified, back to Gus, killer sunglasses on, dossing petrol and flinging a match. Gunter, burned alive and screaming with horror, was “barbecued” Tolly would later say. Gela, one of the other thugs, is then ruthlessly disposed of with two bullets at his home. With the unwitting assistance of Connors’ and Gus, Tolly has avenged the last of the men who killed his father. 

In a subsequent scene, Gus brings Tolly a gun. He reminds Tolly of Mencken’s kid, Jenny. In a killer shot from Tolly’s perspective, Gus hands him a drink and gazing off into the distance matter-of-factly declares: “I ran her down”. Gus says that Connors wants to break Tolly in: “We’re going to wipe out Mencken, his wife and his other kid”. “Oh, and Cuddles. Mr Connors says she’s the broad that sang on Smith…she’ll get it like Gunter got it, like Gela got it. A man like Connors everyone goes”. Expressing the pitiless reality behind the syndicate’s polished facade, Gus urges Tolly: “If you show any professional ability tonight, Mr Connors may give you the crack to finish off Cuddles”. Fully grasping the unremitting savagery of the syndicate, Tolly knocks Gus out and flings him to the front of a police precinct with a note in his pocket: ‘CHECK THIS KILLER’S GUN WITH BULLETS IN GELA.’ A cop reading this note as Gus comes to consciousness is the last we see of him. Tolly kills Connors but is shot in the process and ends up dead in a backstreet lane, just like his father. 

Gus is undoubtedly emblematic of Fuller’s vision of a more organised and corporate visual representation of mob violence in the early 1960s, but Rust’s implacable performance provides much more than just an index of the director’s intentions. The disconnect between his suave politeness and absolute ruthlessness is representative of the murderous violence behind the smooth façade of the syndicate, but the notes of torment ruffling his face when ordered to kill generate far more ambivalence than is typically associated with cold-blooded mobsters. It is this hint of trepidation, only extinguished by his sunglasses persona, that makes the performance so compelling. 

Neil Gray.

View Movie trailer at: https://archive.org/details/underworld-u.-s.-a. 

Peter Lorre | Quicksand | Dir. Irving Pichel | 1950 | 79 mins

1949 was not a good year for Peter Lorre. In 1942 he left a highly successful tenure at Warner Brothers to set up Lorre Inc with Sam Stiefel; by 1949 he was bankrupt and cursing Stiefel’s name to anyone who would listen. His film work was drying up too, partly, Lorre suspected, because he’d been unofficially blacklisted due to his ties to left wing playwright Bertolt Brecht.  He was mainly picking up work doing recitals on radio and acting on TV, a medium he loathed.  It was a gruelling schedule, made worse by his dependency on morphine. Lorre had battled addiction from his twenties when he was given morphine to relieve a burst appendix. By 1947 he was desperate enough to attempt insulin and shock therapy treatment, damaging both physically and mentally. Neither worked. All was not well in his home life either. His wife Karen Verne, bored, insecure and guilt ridden over a son she had left behind in Europe turned to drink and made several suicide attempts. One might have expected the Peter Lorre who turned up on the set of Irving Pitchel’s Quicksand to have been somewhat depressed, but far from it. According to fellow actor Jeanne Cagney he was very jolly, both with him and the film’s main star, Mickey Rooney, making an inspiring double act off-screen. His performance, however, tells a different story. 

The film concerns the antics of one Dan Brady (Mickey Rooney), a cocky auto mechanic whose attempts to impress materialistic femme fatale Vera Novak (Jeanne Cagney) lead him to make a series of disastrous financial decisions which push him into increasingly desperate criminal acts. The film's ‘crime doesn’t pay’ morality is a little hard to swallow at points and the happyish ending is contrived, but its seaside amusements setting is atmospheric, and the performances are all solid. Rooney, usually associated with comedy musicals, delivers an energetic edgy performance worthy of note. But it's Lorre’s performance as Nick, the depressed and bitter penny arcade owner, that steals the film.  We first meet Nick when Vera takes Dan to the arcade to flaunt their relationship in front of Nick, with whom she clearly has history. When she provocatively spins round and says, “Hello Nick!” we get a close-up of his response, or lack of it. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth and replies: “Oh it’s you”. His expression is blank, and his voice is full of profound weariness, he is clearly fed up with Vera and, possibly life itself. 

Lorre was a masterful screen actor, especially of the close-up, his face capable of casting various minute twitches of expression in rapid succession. Here he barely moves a muscle, yet the despondent feeling that radiates from his blank face and the resigned way he says “Oh it’s you” hits as hard as any of his more animated performances. He brings this same lack of energy and enthusiasm to a fight scene between him and Dan, who seems to be moving at twice the speed of Nick during the tussle. At the end of the fight Lorre is sat in the shadows beaten. He wipes himself clean with a blood-stained handkerchief which he realises incriminates Dan for a mugging he committed earlier. Again, his face remains virtually blank and yet he conveys a sense of sadness, fatigue and scheming calculation all at the same time. It’s almost as if the sadness is permanently etched into his face; as if he couldn’t dispel it even if he wanted to. 

Lorre has two other scenes in the film; one where Nick blackmails Dan into stealing a car for him, and another where they exchange the stolen car keys for the incriminating handkerchief. Both scenes see more range from Lorre. The blackmail scene see Nick relaxed and dominant for the first time in the film as he idly toys with Dan, holding up a stolen $50 note to his ear and ‘listening’ to what it tells him as he whispers the name of the man Dan robbed it from. The exchange of the keys is closer to comedy, showing a little of the off-screen warmth the actors clearly shared, but always Lorre brings a jaded sorrow to the proceedings which dominates the scenes. The film shows a wind change in Lorre’s acting which wasn’t picked up on at the time, but you can see the development of this less dynamic, emotionally sincere persona given its fullest expression in his next film, his ill-fated, self-directed German production The Lost One (Der Verlorene, 1951). Over the years critics have come to regard his performance in that film as one of his greatest achievements, praising it for its very personal form of naturalism. Ultimately, Lorre’s was a tragic life and career, a world class actor who, arguably, never fulfilled his potential but none the less used his talents to create some of the most memorable character roles of Hollywood’s Golden age, not to mention his unforgettable performance in Fritz Lang’s German expressionist masterpiece, M (1931). Quicksand is a key moment in his artistic development, where he strove to make a performance uniquely honest and uniquely his own. 

Sandy Milroy.  

View movie at: https://archive.org/details/quicksand.-1950.-dvdrip.x-264-handjob 

Mauri Leighton (‘Maurie Lynn’) | The Big Night | Dir. Joseph Losey | 1951 | 71 mins

The Big Night is a relatively minor noir by Joseph Losey, shaded in that same year by his excellent remake of Fritz Lang’s M, and The Prowler, a thoroughly nasty noir that remains woefully underrated. Nevertheless, it has a charm all of its own, not least John Drew Barrymore’s awkward performance as the haunted adolescent, ‘George La Main’, and Maurie Lynn’s terribly affecting bit-part turn as a beleaguered jazz singer. ‘Georgie’ is introduced as a geeky kid being pushed around by his peers on the street and treated with derision inside his father’s bar when he hints that he may need a razor. The theme of frustrated masculinity looms large as he has to stand aside and watch his father Andy La Main (Preston Foster), who has just baked a birthday cake for him, submit to ‘Al Judge’ (Howard St. John)––a sports columnist coming off like a gangster––stripping down to the waist and going down on all fours to be lashed by Judge’s walking cane before the local barflies. Georgie is naïve and doesn’t understand anything; he can only ask despairingly why his father let himself be humiliated. With his father recovering upstairs, he finds a gun, dons ‘adult’ clothes in the form of a blazer and a sombrero, and sets off into the long night with the bitter taste of birthday cake in his mouth. 

Where is Mauri Lynn in all this? Her brief but heart-breaking role only makes sense when we grasp the trajectory of Georgie’s night, so that must wait. Losey hammers home the discrepancy between how Georgie views himself and how he is viewed by others at a neighbouring drugstore. Asked to babysit for a moment in the backroom, he ‘performs’ himself as a hardman in front of the mirror with his gun (à la Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver) until he backs into the cot and wakes the baby, which he coddles to sleep with gun in hand. At a boxing match he is ripped-off by a grifter posing as a cop after flogging his father’s spare ticket to a passer-by, before spotting Judge ringside. The man sitting next to him is the guy he sold the spare ticket to; a journalist, Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), with a drink habit. Cooper knows where Judge is going next. They follow and for a moment Georgie has him in his sights but isn’t sure or quick enough. By now, Cooper is blazing drunk and has lost his charm. He takes Georgie to The Florida Jazz Club, where he introduces his pleasant but harassed girlfriend, Julie Rostina (Dorothy Comingore). Julie takes Georgie dancing and he starts to like it. She strokes his face and now it seems like he might be a man after all, before Cooper takes her back with a wag of the finger. What comes next is remarkable.

Georgie is left adrift, but starts riffing on the music, nodding his head enthusiastically to the clattering drum solo. The reprieve only lasts a moment before torment returns with the memory of Judge whacking his father repeatedly superimposed on alternating images of the drummer and Georgie in ever-increasing close-up. Georgie winces and slumps onto the table. But then a change of pace, the twinkle of a piano and the gorgeous voice of Maurie Leighton (credited as ‘Maurie Lynn’), a beautiful black torch singer. For a moment, Georgie’s reverie is haunted by dark visions again, but he is soothed by the song and the singer herself. Outside, he bumps into Lynn and with the best of intentions lets her know that she’s “the most wonderful singer in the whole world”. She thanks him with a warm and appreciative smile. But this rapidly turns to shock, weary resignation and a tinge of contempt when he continues, “you’re so beautiful, even if you are…”. Georgie’s face crumbles, mumbling over and again, “I didn’t mean to say it”, and it seems he really didn’t, but it’s too late now. He’s pulled away by Cooper into a taxi declaiming his apologies while Lynn is left leaning against a lamp post, stoic and dignified against a cruel world. 

Some consider the scene superfluous: the race issue never returns in the film. But it’s a truly heart-rending scene, with Lynn’s poised and controlled response to Georgie’s confused utterances acting as a mirror to his immaturity, and perhaps the immaturity and grasping masculinity of American society in general. It would be easy to render this meeting in more unsympathetic terms, but Losey stays with Georgie recognising that he didn’t know any better, isn’t ready for this moment, and we see that racism (conscious or unconscious) is a tragedy for everyone––although of course more so for Lynn. She had little to play with in this role but just a few nuanced facial gestures convey the awful stain of racial discrimination, the emotional shield necessary to defend oneself against it, and the weariness of its continuing presence in American society. Lynn was positioned as a replacement for popular black performers and actresses Lena Horne and Hazel Scott, who had become disillusioned with racism in Hollywood. She would feel this disillusionment too, and this makes the role especially devastating––more so in the knowledge that she was murdered with her stepdaughter in 1969. 

Georgie finally arrives at Judge’s home, but the name on the door is Frances Sedziasky, the woman his father had been seeing, who turns out to be Judge’s sister. Judge tells Georgie that Frances killed herself because Georgie’s father wouldn’t marry her, hence the beating. In the confused fall out, Georgie accidentally shoots Judge (non-fatally) in a tussle over the gun. He remains a child caught up in an adult world he doesn’t yet understand; one where good and bad are not so easily discerned. But this night could be his coming-of-age. The film is really John Drew Barrymore’s, but his encounter with Lynn adds an altogether different dimension in his troubled odyssey towards manhood and this is made possible by the remarkable subtlety and economy of Lynn’s performance. Decent minor roles for women in film noir are relatively rare, even more so for black women. All the more reason to celebrate rare gems like Maurie Lynn in The Big Night.  

Neil Gray.

View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/1951-the-big-night-la-larga-noche-joseph-losey-vose